I Took a $70K Job Instead of $150k and It Made Me a Millionaire With Phil Risher | Ep 93

Made a video back in 2018 about should you take a lower paying job that you enjoy or a higher paying job that you hate? And that video has 17,000 views and still gets comments on it today. But I wanted to make a sequel about what ended up happening to me because I did take that lower paying job and I enjoyed that job. But now it's actually 5x the amount of money that I was making and I make way more money than I was making at this high paying job that I thought of before. And I want to talk about like how did this actually happen? So since that video in 2018, I'm going to kind of tee it up here. I had the skillset to be a sales account executive and go out and sell and make $150,000 a year selling things. But I chose to work at a home service business doing and I was a director of business development making around $70,000 a year. But I loved it. I enjoyed every minute of it because it was working in my wheelhouse. I was making a huge impact on the business. It was fun, fun every single day. And what happened was that business that I was working at, I was so excited about what I was doing. I helped them go from a $3 million revenue business to $5 million revenue business. And in the first year they went from 3 million to 4 million, then 4 million to 5 million and ultimately sold to private equity. And what happened was the owner of that company, he's still a good friend to this day, a mentor. He said, phil, you need to go out and help other businesses do this same thing that you help me do. So he actually named my company Flash Consulting. And he pushed me out and said, hey, go start this company now. We actually my company, we have 14 team members. We were just on Inc. 5000's Best Workplaces. We if you've seen other videos that I made on this channel, we did over seven figures last year. We're probably going to do 2 million this year and we're going to $5 million. And I want to make a really big point on this, which is that I took a lower paying job that I loved and I didn't just go for the highest paying job. And what ended up happening was I loved it so much that I executed at such a high level that I figured out how to make more money by helping more people solve the problems that I enjoyed solving. And I didn't know at the time when I made that video in 2018 that all of this would happen. But now looking back, I would 1000% tell people, take the lower paying job that you love and love what you do and solve people's problems and help them. And if it can turn into a business or helping more people, you will make more money because you thoroughly enjoy it. And one of the things that I really liked about taking this lower paying job was having the flexibility to work in my zone of genius, to use my unique abilities. And a lot of times people get pigeonholed with these golden handcuffs of, you know, I got to make $150,000 and you don't have the same flexibility or creativity inside of your role. And, and you feel stuck. And I did not want to have that stuck. And if you're in a position right now where you feel stuck, you either have to work on something on the side or you have to build a buffer or a gap. So that way you can take a step back of some sorts, but work in something that you actually love and enjoy and build something on the side. Now people say, okay, Phil, yeah, you worked at something that you loved and then you ended up starting this business and somehow you make millions of dollars, you know, on your business, whatever. But I want to talk about some practical things that people can do because it's not just me that has gone through this journey. Funny story, my mom actually went through a similar story where she was had the golden handcuffs, worked at a job she didn't like. And she. And she saw me and she's like, wow, I think I could do something like this. And countless people, I would say probably at least 10 to 15 people have reached out to me about how can I do this, like what you're doing and make that transition into maybe owning a business or doing something that you enjoy that can make more money. So I want to lay out a simple framework here that I would say, even if you just clip this part of the video, like this is a gold mine, that if I ever were to start another business again, I would probably talk about this. All right, so let's say that you work a job and you love what you do, and you have a unique solution that you've built or playbook that makes that gives a good result. Well, what I did was I took the playbook that I mentioned that I figured out because I really liked what I was doing. And let's say that you were to take that playbook and distill it down to like 11 things that you did. This is what I did. There was 11 things. I did this. And this is how I did it. I did this, this is how I did it. And I broke it all out. Now I had this framework, I call it my flash customer journey, because I do like marketing and customer journey stuff. But it could be whatever framework that you want to call it that you, it's your prior, your, your proprietary knowledge that you're building this because you know that it works. Then what I did was I said, okay, if I can sell this, if I was a full time employee, let's say I'm making $70,000 a year. That $70,000 a year is whatever it is a month. It's like probably $3,000, $6,000 per year. Let's just call it $6,000 a year. $6,000 per month. $6,000 a month. If I could cut that in half and let's just say 2,500 bucks. And if I could give this same playbook to someone and execute this playbook because I had it dialed in so tight for 2,500 bucks. Businesses would want that because they're going to be saving three times what they would be spending to have a full time person, plus they would have to manage me, plus they would have to pay benefits and all these other things where they could still get the outcome without spending a bunch of money. This was my thought process. So 2,500 bucks is kind of what I settled on. 2,000, 2,500 bucks. All I needed was four or five people to make a hundred thousand dollars a year. So let's say I have four people paying me 2,500 bucks. That's 2,500, 2500 25, $10,000 times 12. That's $120,000 a year. Now here's the thing that I did was I kind of built that out. I have four or five people and I hired a virtual assistant as my first team member. And she is overseas. She still works with me to this day. I hired her overseas to do all the admin stuff. So I took what I was doing, all the admin things that I didn't enjoy doing, and I taught her how to do it for about $20,000. So I said, hey, I need you to do this, this and this, build this report, do this stuff over here. And I slowly started to teach her my systems and processes. I didn't give her the entire keys to the castle. I said, hey, I need you to help me with these things, these things over here, and then I'm going to execute on these things over here. So let's just say $20,000. You hire someone Virtual assistant do that. Then you have this hundred thousand dollar buffer and you're making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Now what happened with me was you could do that many, many, many, many times and then hire other team members. Or you could just get four or five people with that same framework. You're saving them money and you're implementing this playbook and you have team members that are helping support you and you can do this. Knowing what I know now, I would not go back to a job unless it was to learn a skill. So I had someone reach out to me recently. He's in a job that he doesn't like and he's like, hey, I'm thinking about doing email newsletters. I'm like, okay, well what does that even mean? Like, you want to do email newsletters for who? For what? And my recommendation to him was, where do you currently work now? He works at a recruiting company. I said, okay, let's take your recruiting company for example. Start with doing newsletters for them. They don't do newsletters. So go to the owner or the marketing team and say, hey, I, I really like newsletters. I enjoy doing them on the side. I'm going to do them for free. Can I build a newsletter for us and just track the progress of what happens, Revenue that comes in, sales. I really want to dial this in. It's basically free product market fit to see if this actually works. Once you get that dialed in, then you can go to every recruiting firm and say, hey, I have an email newsletter that did X, Y and Z and I can roll it out for your business for whatever it costs or whatever that looks like. This is the part of doing something that you love because if you love what you do, you're going to dive in deep fully and want to figure out solutions and problem solve. If you're just doing a job to make a bunch of money, that is not bad. It just, you don't have the same passion in what you're doing. And so you're not going to continually try to learn or get better or educate. You're just going to be a means to an end to make money and then move on to the next thing in your life. You know, live for the weekend and die for Mondays basically. And that's not what I'm about. And hindsight 2020 because in 2018 I made this video and now look, it's 2025, seven years later. And this is the outcome of what happened. And I'm sharing this because hopefully it can educate you that like you can take a lower paying job and it can turn out in the long run if you do that plan that I just told you, which is what I did. Not saying you have to, but that's exactly what I did to get to the next point. I will say this though, doing what you love is, is almost a myth as well. Because if you do what you love, it can be much harder to make money if you don't have any business acumen in it. For example, like you might love writing newspaper articles, but if a newspaper is dying, then it doesn't matter if you like love writing newspaper articles if there's no one that wants to buy it. And that's why you have to have this fine line between being almost realistic in what you're doing from a job perspective and that is going to actually make money versus being far fetched and think that, okay, I'm just going to go ride my skateboard or ride my surfboard and like somehow I'm going to make money off this stuff. So I would say there has to be a component of what you love. Like so full transparency. The lower paying job that I took, I was working at an air duct cleaning company, a home service business that was doing air duct cleaning, like cleaning people's air ducts, their dryer vents, all this, you know, stuff that's not like super fancy and it's kind of gross. Like I didn't love air duct cleaning, I didn't love what I was doing from that perspective. But what I did love was helping this business grow using digital marketing data and sales and automation. And that was the part that I was able to turn into a business. So I think there's components of like in loving what, where you work, what you do, but then also the day to day tasks of what you do and the components of the business that you are affecting. All right, and then to summarize all this, there is a great book called Thou shall Prosper. And I read this book a couple years ago and it transformed the way that I think about what I do. And this philosophy is that you should prosper. And I'm a Christian. And this kind of hit me square in the face was that as a Christian, there's a parable about talents. Even if you're not a Christian, there's a parable about talents. And the parable goes like this. The person that has talent, everyone has talents. One person goes and buries those talents and later down the line they take those talents and they bring them back and they say, here you go and the person says, you're an idiot. You're supposed to multiply your talents. You're supposed to take your talents and go and help other people and get more talents out of those things. You're supposed to use the talents that you have to help other people and to grow. And this hit me square in the face is that if you love what you do, you have unique talents and abilities to do this. You should be going out and multiplying these talents to help more people. This is the thou shall prosper philosophy, is that truly I believe that my calling is to help people. And if I my calling is to help people, why should I just stop with the people that I'm currently helping right now? How can I help more people? That's literally why I make content like this on my YouTube channel. And that's why I make content on my Flash consulting business channel to help people. Because the more people that you help, the more that people will want you. They want, want to pay you to help them. You have to solve people's problems first and help them first. And if the money comes, the money comes. But at the end of the day, if you have a unique skill set and ability and you're passionate about what you do, you can go and help people. So what does this mean for you? Okay, you're working at a job that you hate, but you know that you would like something like this. Well, what if you started making content about what you actually love to do and you started helping people do these things? There's a good saying that literally there's a hundred thousand dollar business sitting in your Google Drive of things that you've made or done or processes or systems or things that you've written. What if you just carve that out and you started helping people for free do this stuff? You give the recipe and then sell the cooking. Say, hey, I'm here to help. I'm adding value, I'm leading with value. And if it makes sense to help you, then great, I'll help you here. If you're working at a job that you love and you have all this stuff and you love it and you want to help more people, which I believe that you should, well then you should be sharing this content out there and helping people, giving the recipe and then selling the cooking. And that's exactly how I grew my business. It's been six years that I've been in business and it's just slowly been adding value, helping people. Now I mentioned Inc 5000 Best Workplaces, you know, multiple seven figures, big team, all this kind of stuff. Well, big team, team of 14 people, I don't think it's big yet. I think, you know, 100 people plus is big. But that's besides the point. I'm still doing what I love and I'm making more money than I ever thought was possible because I worked at a lower paying job that I love and I wanted to help more people. And I think that's a great way to summarize this entire video is that just because you do a lower paying job that you love doesn't mean that it's always going to be lower paying and that you can make more money by doing what you love.